Friday, December 07, 2007

Colonel Chabert certainly had some strong opinions about Mark K-Punk and his writing. Could part of it just be the Punk thing?

I remember growing up the kind of disdain working people had for the eight years out of date punk scene. Truly it was more loathing than disquietude. It was especially adressed to this one punk who wandered round the shopping centre with a child's swing chained to his jeans. Many drank. At this time cheap supermarket lager made it feasible to drink outdoors in the afternoon. There was also a glue panic. I was more into BMX. A playground marked up with sex pistols graffiti yet generated a sense of menace, both seductive and repellant, of the sort ruined by actually listening, years later, to the tedious sex pistols records.

Anyway, I think the line of argument borrowed from Dr Žižek in Mark's theory masterpiece Marxist Supernanny gets the "ideology of late capitalism" wrong. Mark writes:

"In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Žižek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering."*

There are really two things to consider that are intimitely related: liberalism as an ideology and the actual economic base, constructed on the principle of seperation, of which liberalism** represents an idealised version. Ideologically liberalism is basically private property conceived as not being underpinned by coercion. This is something like a philosophy where substances persist in themselves indefinitely without any kind of totalisation. And as such this diverges from Spinoza's metaphysical plan at the point where Spinoza introduces the idea of God as substance subsuming the various substances, and so effecting just this kind of totalisation. And we can maybe accept the Deleuzist argument, if only provisionally that politics and theology operate on the same "level" without making politics a determinant of theology or vice versa.

*my hacheks

** i.e. economic liberalism of which anglo-saxonic conservatism is a degenerate form

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Income distribution for various countries: percentage of national income or consumption for successive quintiles of population assigned by income, i.e. quintile A means bottom 20%, quintile B next 20% etc. The bureaucrats at Penn State Uni explain the whole thing, and with better html.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Forty years ago Simon Kuznets' pioneering studies of national income disclosed a significant relationship between income and inequality, such that:

a rise in income in low income countries tended to be consistant with greater inequality; a rise in income in high income countries tended to be consistant with less inequality.

From this empirical fact the "Kuznets curve" was theorised, illustrating a supposedly universal pattern of development whereby as an economy develops inequality first rises then falls.

This procedure involves an extra presupposition. Economies are considered as effective parallels of each other. Their interrelation and the way they function as part of a unified world economy is abstracted from.

This was never the cutting edge of neoliberal development theory, but the assumptions made here have to be considered in the context of practical measures in this sphere: the decades of IMF austerity measures etc. It goes some way toward furnishing these policies with a theoretical basis, or at least a post hoc explanation.

The consequent story about development also, deliberately or accidentally, has certain features in common with victorian moralising. And it wouldn't be too surprising to see a trickle down version of this theory in the pages of The Economist militating for the underdeveloped world to "take its medecine".

Are we obliged to consider this universalisation of the European and American experience, which provides a rationale for the programmes of their proxy, as an example of the sort of phenomenon Edward Saïd discusses in Orientalism? One important differance is that the presuppositions of something like the Kuznets curve typify mere disinterest rather than an aggressive objectification. The pathology differs.